My Own Experience

I have been continuing to struggle at work a bit. I can’t say that I have nothing to do: I do have occasional pieces of work that I find interesting enough. But no work that to me justifies my presence in their organization.

My friend Carl put it in a way that I really liked: everyone has their own challenges to face. This is entirely true. If I wasn’t facing the challenge of work, there would be something else on my path giving me a struggle.

I am trying to determine what my ideal work situation would be. Ideally, it would be for an organization to just put some huge project in my lap and tell me to figure it out. I really love challenges like that. I like learning on the fly. I realize, however, that my ideal situation is not possible at RRP+. We are not an implementing body, we are a coordinating body. We do very little programming at all. Additionally, we are new. Brand new babies in the non-profit world of HIV/AIDS in Rwanda. But we are almost too big to still be a baby, growing at a rate I can’t quite understand. We are 800 associations of people living with HIV/AIDS.

It’s almost as if we were born a 100 pound baby, that was already expected to be able to read, write and be socially capable.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the work that I would like to do here. I would really love to work on their monitoring and evaluation systems, that are entirely non-existant. The problem is that I can’t quite get a grasp on how they plan to tackle this (or more importantly, IF they plan to tackle it). The funding they would require for it is huge, and donors don’t like funding running costs like M&E.

Alternately, I’ve thought about helping them with project implementation plans. They have all this money, I think? But I don’t quite know how they implement. The RRP+ “projects” are a big, black hole to me, despite many hours of conversation on this point.

I really don’t know how this will progress. Right now, I have very little work, even still. I really want this to change. But maybe my challenge is to just deal with the situation as it has presented itself. And trust that it will build my character and career in the way that it is meant to. For now, I will wait. I will wait and trust.

It is raining again in Kigali! A beautiful rain that is taking away the heat, leaving a nice mist in its place. TGIF.